The Internet has become a powerful and essential tool for marketing and promoting nearly any kind of business. Prospective customers use search engines and online directories to locate nearby businesses offering the products and services which interest them, with the further hope that they will be able to learn more about these services by visiting these business' respective websites.
As more and more businesses realize the power and importance of maintaining a strong presence on the Internet, the field becomes increasingly more crowded and it becomes even more important to differentiate one's self from local competitors.
In the end, it all comes down to identity and branding. Astute business owners are keenly aware that their online identity factors in considerably toward their ultimate success. Blending in with the competition is simply not acceptable. This includes both the visual appearance of their websites and how their businesses are located through Google™ and other related search services.
Costs are another big factor and concern for many new website owners. Maintaining a unique identity traditionally requires a level of manual customization and attention which drives up costs and frequently becomes a competitive barrier for smaller businesses.
Do-it-Yourself Websites
Creating and maintaining a relevant Internet presence often requires a significant commitment of time and resources, as well as a high level of skill with regard to how to craft websites and be found in the search engines with any kind of frequency. Without the requisite skills of the trade, a do-it-yourself approach toward online marketing is often doomed to fail. And knowing this, business owners quickly turn to a myriad of products and services offered by vendors claiming to make it easier to get up and running quickly and start competing for market share.
The first hurdle to overcome when creating a website is learning HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This is an arcane computer syntax interpreted by web browsers and used universally throughout the Internet to publish web pages. Fortunately, there are a variety of products available to help shield users from most of this; with one of the most popular in recent times being the free Open Source software named WordPress™.
However, being relieved from learning HTML still leaves a host of other obstacles to be dealt with. Somebody still has to write the copy, lay out pages and create dozens of images. And when that's all done, there will be constant maintenance required to keep the site current and optimized to perform well in the search engines.
Ready-Made Templates
In recent years, a multitude of suppliers have emerged who offer ready-made templates to give customers a head start on organizing their websites. At the low end are free and low-cost artistically-pleasing templates which plug directly into WordPress™ and similar content management systems.
For those willing to spend a bit more, it's often possible to find higher caliber templates which even include content, text and images relating to their profession or industry. But even with these, unless they are further customized, purchasers quickly find their sites look identical to those belonging to competitors who may have also purchased the same “stock” template and also failed to customize it.
In the “old days” where nearly all websites were hand crafted, ending up with a visually unique website was a natural benefit of the process. However, as automation comes into play, so does a level of duplication—and customers simply are not happy with this. They want the lower costs offered by advanced automation, but they also want to know that their websites are totally unique; as if hand-crafted by a professional design shop.
Professional Website Design Shops
An even more expensive option is outsourcing. Faced with seeing the enormous amount of time and energy which could easily be consumed trying to create and maintain a quality website, business owners looking to excel or dominate in their respective markets often employ the services of a professional website design shop. Outsourcing holds the promise of getting the job done right without the commitment of one's own time, but it often comes at a steep price—frequently upwards of $10,000, not including monthly maintenance fees.
Another advantage of using a professional website designer is that they would likely be more familiar with search engine optimization techniques and would therefore have a better chance of getting their sites to rank well in search engines such as Google™.
Large-Scale Managed Service Providers
Looking to bridge the gap between using the free WordPress™ software with ready-made templates and the expensive professional design shops, a new breed of service providers arrived on the scene promising to keep costs down, yet still offer a mostly hands-off approach to maintaining a meaningful Internet presence. These new service providers frequently specialize in just one or two vertical markets and often work with hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of businesses in the same industry or profession—for example, real estate or attorneys.
In the same vein as how large-scale website hosting companies such as Yahoo and GoDaddy™ have significantly lowered the cost of publishing do-it-yourself websites, these managed service providers have consequently lowered the cost of entry for small businesses in need of a fully managed solution.
These providers are able to offer an extreme level of service at greatly reduced costs by reusing a variety of highly-specialized and evolved industry-centric content over and over again as they take on new clients. To keep sites from looking too much like each other, they have in-house website specialists shepherd the production process and make whatever adjustments might be necessary to provide clients with distinctive and uniquely-looking websites.
Although the managed service provider model offers many clear benefits to customers, the model starts to fall apart when a provider reaches a certain saturation level within specific geographic markets. The problem is that it becomes difficult to constantly keep coming up with distinctively unique websites for competing customers in close proximity to one another when reusing the same content and trying to reduce labor costs.
Fully Automated Website Generation
The next frontier for vertical market managed service providers is to offer the same level of service as just described, but using a fully automated delivery model which would greatly reduce costs by eliminating the large labor component which has traditionally been required to provide the requisite level of service and customization.
Employing a fully automated website generation system could solve a large number of other traditional problems as well, such as keeping websites up to date with search engine optimization techniques and quickly integrating emergent Internet technologies such as mobile web, social networking, video and chat.
However, the problem with large-scale automation is that we suddenly find ourselves back to facing the same problem everyone's been fighting all along—identity. Automation leads to repetition and reuse of a limited set of content, and this is exactly what customers do not want.
The invention described herein is intended to address the aforementioned concerns as they relate to creating distinctively unique websites and marketing them in the search engines in the wake of increased automation being employed by service providers in order to reduce the cost of delivery.
The purpose of the invention described herein is to directly address the issue of repetition in the course of generating high-caliber vertical market websites without human intervention. By effectively solving this problem, extremely low-cost managed services can be offered to thousands of customers without running into the saturation issues which have traditionally stunted the growth of existing vendors.
The described methodology therefore paves the way for a new level of scale and economy which has otherwise yet to be achieved.